The present study investigated the perceptual assimilation of SSBE vowels by Punjabi Urdu speakers who learn English at school. Therefore, as opposed to previous studies (Strange et al., 2007; Gilichinskaya and Strange, 2010; Escudero and Chládková, 2010), the listeners were not naïve or inexperienced learners of SSBE; however, the English language they learn is Pakistani English (PE) spoken in Punjab, Pakistan (as discussed in Section 4.1.1), which has very little to do with SSBE. According to L2 speech learning theories, L2 learners face difficulties in the perception and production of L2 segments (i.e. vowels and consonants) which are either new (do not occur in their L1) or are very close (phonetically) to L1 segments. This study intended to investigate if the predictions of PAM, L2LP and SLM are applicable to the perception of SSBE vowels where L2 (English) is learnt from a very young age in a non-native context and used as lingua franca in everyday life. Hence the L2 users are not inexperienced learners.
In summary, very little is known about how native Punjabi-Urdu speakers perceive and process Standard Southern British English (SSBE) vowels, and this study hopes to begin to shed light on this research question. This will be the first study of its kind to investigate the perception of SSBE vowels by native speakers of Punjabi-Urdu. In Pakistan, almost everyone is multilingual, and at least bilingual. Previous studies on multilingual and bilingual learners’ acquisition of a third language (L3/Ln) report that although both L1 and L2 affect the acquisition of L3, it is mainly the dominant language (L2) that interferes with the learning of L3 (Hammarberg and Hammarberg, 2009; Llama et al., 2010; Hammarberg, 2014; Lipińska, 2017). Therefore, the present study was designed to investigate the perception of SSBE vowels after the investigation of the Urdu vowel system as spoken in Punjab, Pakistan (i.e. the Urdu spoken by Punjabi L1 speakers). Based on the second language perception models and literature review, the predictions for the present study were as follows:
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4.4.1 General Predictions: According to SLM
• Due to equivalence classification (Flege, 1995), Punjabi-Urdu speakers will not establish separate categories for English monophthongs that are found in the same phonological/acoustic space as a monophthong in Urdu, for example: /iː/, /ɪ/, /ɛ/, /ʌ/ and /ɒ/. As a result, the speakers’ production of such monophthongs will not be very accurate because they will be collapsed with the similar L1 segments. • Punjabi-Urdu listeners will be able to establish new phonetic categories for
English monophthongs and diphthongs that do not have a counterpart in Urdu phonological and phonetic system, for example: /æ/, /ɜː/, /ɔː/, /əʊ/ and /eɪ/. • Punjabi-Urdu listeners will be able to discern the phonetic differences between
English and Urdu monophthongs and diphthongs, and will be able to establish new phonetic categories for them.
4.4.2 General Predictions: According to PAM and L2LP
Based on an acoustic comparison of SSBE and Punjabi-Urdu vowel system, we can predict the following patterns of assimilation:
• Given the number of Urdu vowels there will be more patterns for two-category (TC) assimilation of SSBE vowels.
• Due to the cross-language acoustic/perceived similarity (Escudero and Boersma, 2005; Flege, Munro and Fox, 1994) there will be some single-category (SC) assimilation patterns of SSBE /ɛ/-/æ/, /ɜː/-/ʌ/ and /ɔː/-/ɒ/, since there is only one vowel in the Urdu vowel inventory in the corresponding vowel space, i.e. open- mid front, central, and open-mid back, respectively.
• There will be fewer category-goodness (CG) assimilation patterns.
• There will be more uncategorised-uncategorised (UU) assimilation patterns, especially for English front vowels /ɛ/, /æ/, back vowels /ɔː/, /ɒ/ and diphthongs.
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4.4.3 Broad Research Questions
● Which dimensions Punjabi-Urdu listeners use to classify the 19 SSBE vowels? ● How do Punjabi-Urdu listeners perceptually assimilate the 19 SSBE vowels to the
Urdu vowels?
● How do Punjabi-Urdu listeners perceptually assimilate the long and short SSBE vowels to Urdu long and short vowels?
● To what extent do the perceptual assimilation patterns differ for the 19 SSBE vowels produced and presented in two different contexts, i.e. disyllabic hVba vs. monosyllabic bVd?
● To what extent do the perceptual assimilation and free classification patterns differ for the 19 SSBE vowels produced and presented in different contexts, i.e. disyllabic hVba vs. monosyllabic bVd and hVd?
In order to answer these questions, a cross-language perceptual assimilation experiment and a free classification experiment was conducted. Chapter 5 reports on the perceptual assimilation of SSBE vowels. Chapter 6 reports on the free classification of the same 19 SSBE vowels. The reasons for selecting two different types of experiments and three different contexts are further discussed in the following chapters (Chapters 5 and 6).
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Chapter 5
Perceptual Assimilation of SSBE vowels
This chapter reports on an experiment investigating the perception of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) vowels by Punjabi-Urdu speakers from Punjab, Pakistan. As discussed in Section 1.3 and 4.1, Received Pronunciation (RP) is the standard variety of English taught in Pakistan. In the present study, RP vowel symbols are used as reported by Hawkins and Midgley (2005), however, the stimuli were recorded from SSBE speakers as discussed in Section 5.2.2. The Cross-language mapping and category goodness rating task is reported in the literature as the most reliable method of investigating the perceived relation between L1 and L2 vowels (Best, 1995; Flege, Bohn and Jang, 1997; Ingram and Park, 1997; Schmidt, 1996). In a cross-language mapping task, L2 learners who are phonetically untrained, assimilate multiple natural tokens of L2 vowels to the given L1 categories. After the mapping of L2 vowels to the given L1 categories, they rate the category goodness of the L2 vowels on how similar or dissimilar the L2 vowel is from those in L1. These goodness ratings (usually from 1-7, Strange et al., 1998) then show which L2 vowels were considered good or bad examples for L1 vowels. If multiple vowels are mapped to a certain L1 category, it is labelled as single- category assimilation, and category goodness ratings show which one of those L2 vowels were perceived as the best example of or closest to the L1 category. If two L2 vowels are mapped to two separate L1 categories, those are labelled as two-category assimilation (Flege, 1995; Best, 1995; Flege et al., 1997; Ingram and Park, 1997; Best and Tyler, 2007).
Given the status and role of English in Pakistan (as discussed Chapters 1 and 4), this study investigated if the predictions of SLM and PAM models (see Chapter 4) are applicable to
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the perception of SSBE vowels, where L2 (English) is learnt from a very young age in a non-native context and used as lingua franca in everyday life. Hence the L2 speakers are not inexperienced learners. Since there is no literature investigating the perception of SSBE vowels by Punjabi-Urdu speakers, this study employed perceptual assimilation and goodness rating task for the SSBE vowels (11 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs). Such a cross-language mapping task is ideal for examining the perceptual phonetic distance between L1 phonemes and L2 phones (Best, Faber and Levitt, 1996) and predicting the difficulties in the discrimination of L2 phones. The main objective of this experiment was to address the following research questions:
a) How do Punjabi-Urdu speakers perceptually assimilate the SSBE vowels; i.e. is it spectral or temporal information they are sensitive to, or both?
b) What are the most confusing English vowels for Punjabi-Urdu listeners, which lead to either mispronunciation or a strong accent while speaking English? c) Which English vowels are perceptually assimilated with which Urdu vowels? d) To what extent perceptual assimilation is influenced by a context bVd familiar to
the participants as a word of English (e.g. bud) vs. an unfamiliar context hVba (e.g. huba)?